Scheherazade Goes West

by Fatema Mernissi

  “By God, ladies,” he says, “my pay is not little, for I deserve not even two Dirhams, but I have been wondering about your situation and the absence of anyone to entertain you. For a table needs four legs to stand on, you being three, likewise need a fourth, for the pleasure of men is not complete without women, and the pleasure of women is not complete without men.”8

  But what the porter does not realize is that he will have to prove himself before the sisters will allow him to change his status from servant to sexual partner. After coldly reminding him that “Without gain, love is not worth a grain,” the three ladies explain::

  “You know very well that this table has cost us a lot and that we have spent a great deal of money to get all these provisions. Do you have anything to pay in return for the entertainment? For we shall not let you stay unless we see your share, otherwise you will drink and enjoy yourself with us at our expense.”9

  Well, what can make a poor man sexy? This is the tough question that the porter has to face, and he works to convince his hostesses that his intellectual capacity and sensitivity make him a superior lover.

  “Trust me,” he pleads. “I am a sensible and wise man. I have studied the sciences and attained knowledge; I have read and learned . . . and I am well-behaved.”10 And it is only then, after the porter has acknowledged that the giving and taking of sexual pleasure is a brainy task, that the sisters allow him to join in the party.

  They start drinking wine and talking brilliantly into the night. Then the sister who first picked him up undresses and jumps into a lovely pool in the middle of the courtyard.

  Then she washed herself under her breasts, between her thighs, and inside her navel. Then she rushed out of the pool, sat naked in the porter’s lap and, pointing to her slit, asked,

  “My lord and my love, what is this?”

  “Your womb,” said he.

  “Pooh, pooh, you have no shame,” she replied, slapping him on the neck.

  “Your vulva,” said he, and the other sister pinched him, shouting, “Bah, this is an ugly word.” . . . And they went on, this one boxing him, that one slapping him, another hitting him. . . .11

  The torture stops only when the porter finally understands the rule of the game: A man can never correctly name what a woman has between her legs. Only when the porter confesses that he does not know what to call a woman’s sexual organ, and asks the ladies to help him, do the beating and slapping stop.

  The porter then has to go through the same test ith the other two sisters, both of whom also come out of the pool totally naked, jump in his lap, and ask the same question. Each time, he is beaten until he realizes that what is expected of him is to confess his ignorance concerning female genitalia. The message that he keeps forgetting is that it is foolish for a man to pretend to name what only a woman can control — her sex. For men to control what they cannot even adequately name is therefore pure delusion. This political dimension of The Thousand and One Nights, stressing female self-determination, helps to explain why, in the 1980s and 1990s, Egyptian fundamentalists repeatedly burned symbolic copies of the populist Arabic editions of the book, available in any medina for a mere 60 Dhs (6 dollars) for two volumes. And although no one knows how well the censored version of The Thousand and One Nights, which the fundamentalists then had printed, sold on the Egyptian market, what is certain is that in the Arab world no one mistakes Scheherazade’s descriptions of sex for trivial pornography.

  Which brings us back to our initial question: Why did the enlightened West, obsessed with democracy and human rights, discard Scheherazade’s brainy sensuality and political message in their versions of the tales? Because when, two hundred years after Galland’s translation, Scheherazade made a spectacular comeback in a twentieth-century Europe agitated with all kinds of revolutions and progressive ideas, she was again held hostage — this time by two Russian artists, Diaghilev and Nijinsky. Both used her to celebrate the body as the sole source of sexual pleasure, and achieved, in modern Paris, what Shahrayar had failed to do in medieval Baghdad — they silenced the storyteller.

  Sergey Diaghilev had left his native Russia and come to Paris with his troupe, Ballets Russes, in 1910. His ballet Scheherazade, with costumes by Leon Bakst, then unleashed a continent-wide rage for harem-inspired fashion, especially the unforgettable harem pants, first designed by the French couturier Poiret. Poor Scheherazade was now condemned to exist only from the navel down. She had pants, yes, but no brain. She could dance, but Nijinsky was in control.

  Vaslav Nijinsky rose to stardom as the golden slave in Diaghilev’s ballet, Scheherazade, appearing “in brown body paint, and grinning, and wound with pearls — not so much as a sex object but as sex itself, with all the accouterments of perversity that the fin-de-siècle imagination could supply: exotism, androgyny, enslavement, violence.”12 Nijinsky’s androgyny forced his admirers to focus on what men and women had in common. Yet insisting on the differences between the sexes, and forcing men to think about them, had been Scheherazade’s unflinching, centuries-old message.

  In addition, “the Ballets Russes unsettled gender norms. . . . The ballet companies were often characterized by a gender inversion of sexual power in which the dominant woman is desiring and the feminized man is desired.”13 This reversal of male-female power was totally antithetical to a dialogue between the sexes, which is what Scheherazade and her tales are all about.

  Nijinsky’s ballet also influenced Hollywood to overemphasize the purely sexual dimension of Oriental dance, and thereby blur its cosmic dimension, which can be traced back to the ancient Goddess cults. Many scholars believe that Oriental dance, also known as belly-dancing, was first developed by the Semites in the lustful temples of Ishtar, the goddess of love. “The Babylonian Ishtar in her oldest form is . . . a mother-goddess, unmarried, or rather choosing her temporary partners at will, the queen head and first-born of all gods.”14 To honor Ishtar and celebrate women’s sovereign right to self-determination, devotees performed both dance and sex in her temples. With the fall of the Goddess cults, however, and the rise of the Gods, the women in the Ishtar temples were identified as sacred prostitutes. Therefore, millennia after the Goddess’s defeat, it is not at all surprising that the sight of a woman dancing alone, as is usually the case in Oriental dance, stirs strange feelings and triggers incomprehensible anxieties.

  In the Middle East and North Africa today, the belly-dance is seldom viewed, at least by women, as the monochromatic, physical agitation of the flesh, divorced from spirituality, that it is often portrayed as being in Hollywood films. In countries such as Morocco, the cults of goddesses like Venus and the Phoenician Tanit (both incarnations of Ishtar) thrived for centuries before the advent of Islam, and even today, semi-magic trance-dances are still being performed in caves all along the Atlantic Coast. During the religious festival of Moulay Abdalla, for example, celebrated a few kilometers from Casablanca, women play a key role in the ceremonies, defying the religious orthodoxy and its censors.

  For centuries, mothers and aunts have taught little girls the elementary gestures of the Oriental dance as an exercise in empowerment. The dance is transmitted from generation to generation as a celebration of the body and a ritual of self-enhancement. For me, a writer who spends hours sitting in a chair, the Oriental dance is the only hobby and physical exercise I indulge in. I hate jogging and calisthenics and, like many of my female colleagues at the university, rush to the crowded Agdal fitness center at the end of the day to dutifully imitate the movements of Professor Magid, my favorite Egyptian dance instructor. The only thing that bothers me is that he pays more attention to the students than he does to us older professors. But you can bet that I always make some remark to ensure that all Muslims attending his class be treated equally. In an Arab world suffering from aggressive globalization, everything seems to be changing at vertiginous speed, except for women’s stubborn need, regardless of age and social class, for a self-empowering dose of the trance-like Oriental dance. And t
his brings me back to our enigma: Why is this self-enhancing spiritual dimension of the Oriental dance missing in Hollywood’s harems and representations of Scheherazade?

  Hollywood’s Orient, as portrayed in films such as Kismet (1920), The Sheik (1921), and The Thief of Baghdad (1924), was greatly influenced by the Russian ballets and costumes. The Ballet Russes, which toured the U.S. after its Parisian success, reduced the belly-dance to a series of trivial frills, with moments of a satanic perversity.15 The feminine beauty that the movies projected was an often rather frightening “orientalized vamp” — a word that comes from “vampire.“16 Hollywood’s favorite metaphor for the vamp’s sexuality was that of a spider who entraps and destroys the hapless male. And of course the vamp does not encourage a man to engage in dialogue, but rather magnifies his fear.

  Although many of the Western men I spoke with said that they had read an illustrated version of The Thousand and One Nights in childhood, it was the Hollywood films that seemed to have influenced them the most. Many men mentioned Universal’s 1942 production of Arabian Nights, and invoked Maria Montez. This fiery actress specialized in Technicolor productions portraying the harem ladies as dressed in nothing but flimsy, transparent bras and skirts. But even when Maria Montez’s star started to fade, the Arabian Nights genre, which primarily had to do with cabaret atmosphere, thrived for decades. Universal’s Arabian Nights, writes historian Matthew Bernstein, “grossed several million dollars during World War II. It inaugurated a string of low-budget, Technicolor fantasies starring Maria Montez, with scantily clad harem women and brutally nasty despots (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and Cobra Woman, both in 1944, etc.). The formula was reproduced at other studios through the 1960s and upgraded in ancient and biblical wide-screen epics of the era, such as Solomon and Sheba (1959) and Cleopatra.”17

  In addition to trivializing the belly-dance, the harem women traveling West also became associated with cosmetics. Body-beautification is a highly developed art in The Thousand and One Nights, where both men and women indulge in lengthy baths and perfume themselves in order to be more attractive. And this cosmetic dimension of Scheherazade’s tales has had a more lasting and deeper impact on Western culture than their philosophical teachings. Harem-inspired cosmetics such as kohl and henna soon became part of the West’s beauty secrets, reversing in at least one area the direction of colonization and transforming the conquerors into the conquered. “One indication of the prestige of the harem could be seen in the popularity of its beauty recipes,” write Yvonne Knibiehler and Régine Goutalier, two women who have analyzed Western women’s reaction to the Orient. “César Birotteau, Balzac’s hairdresser, made a fortune selling his famous ‘Mix of the Sultanes.’ As for henna, kohl, and ghassoul (scented clay), they are still widely used in Europe today.”18

  In the early twentieth century, a whole series of harem beauty and cosmetic treatises flourished. One of the oddest is Moroccan Harem Practices: Magic, Medicine and Beauty by Mme A. R. de Lenz, the daughter of a French medical doctor who lived in Morocco in the 1920s. Lenz interviewed women about their beauty secrets,19 but either because the interviewer had not mastered Arabic or because the women were not accustomed to being interviewed, most of their “secrets” appear to be just hilarious inventions — making the book highly entertaining. The West’s fascination with harem beauty secrets lasted “until Pasteur and hygienic compulsion transformed the whole field into a scientifically-managed pharmaceutical business.”20

  In conclusion, one could say that the West’s understanding of Scheherazade and the harem world was skin-deep, cosmetic and superficial. The storyteller’s yearning for a dialogue between men and women found no echo in the West. And why, I kept wondering again and again, was this the case?

  I was sitting quite exhausted in the Berlin airport, waiting for my flight to Paris, the last stop on my book promotion tour, and feeling sorry for myself for having made so little progress on my harem conundrum, when I had the bright idea to call Kemal. The day before, I had faxed him my first notes regarding the harem discoveries I d made in the Berlin bookstores and at the Scheherazade ballet, and wanted to hear his reactions. I started looking for an available phone. I know that I am extremely homesick when I start squandering money on telephone calls to Morocco, and yet, I hesitated before making this call. It might be awkward to just ask Kemal out of the blue what he thinks of what I think of Western men’s fantasies, I thought. Yes, maybe I should refrain from calling Morocco altogether.

  Suddenly I felt thirsty — for guess what? I had a strong desire for a sip of strong mint-perfumed green tea served in a crystal glass. Yes, tea must be served in a crystal glass, as in Morocco, where much of the pleasure of drinking tea is looking at its golden color between sips. I was so involved in my mint-tea fantasy that I barely heard a message announced over the loudspeaker. My flight was running late, and I had at least an hour to kill. “I can’t believe this,” I mumbled to myself in Arabic. “It is as if Fate has created an unavoidable opportunity for me to call Morocco.” But I should resist this kind of obscure intervention, I then thought, and not call. I should get a glass of tea instead. Yes. I stood up and very determinedly headed toward the nearest café-bar, where I ordered tea. A few minutes later, a cup of strong, black Lipton in a huge opaque cup was handed to me. That killed my desire for tea on the spot. Shuddering, I paid quickly and hurried toward the telephone booth.

  “Allo! Kemal? Labes?”(Labes is the Arabic equivalent of “how are you.” It literally means “no problems on sight?”) “I miss you and I am homesick,” I added quickly when I realized that there was only silence on the other end.

  “It does not look as if you miss anyone in the Arab world, Fatema,” came Kemal’s delayed response. It is a bad sign when an Arab man sounds too calm and composed. “I gather from your notes that you are totally entranced by Western men. You are under their spell. You have written almost a whole book about them, so deep is your passion.”

  To have a fight while calling long distance is an expensive luxury. So I kept silent. Knowing Kemal as well as I do, I knew that he would soon feel guilty for being so impolite to me — poor creature that I was, so far away from sunny Morocco, in the harsh European climate. The silence worked.

  “Allo! Fatema? Are you still there?” Kemal sounded very concerned now. “I am sorry to have been so rude. It must be cold over there.” Then, after a minute of silence, he added softly, as if talking to himself, “Western men might not be as interesting as you think. They might be playing slightly different games, but they are just as scared of losing ground to women as we Arabs are.”

  “Kemal, what are you driving at? How is their game different?” I asked as calmly as I could. I was literally hugging the damn telephone. I knew Kemal too well. He had some interesting insights into my harem problem and knew that I was dying to know what they were. He knows me too well, too.

  “Kemal, I am going to miss my flight,” I said finally.

  “Fatema.” Kemal was speaking at last. “I think that you did not read Edgar Allan Poe’s story through to the end, did you? As usual, you just buy books and expect others to read them for you.”

  “No, I did not,” I confessed,, a little embarrassed to admit that, so far, I had only skimmed the first paragraphs of the short story.

  “The American writer assassinated Scheherazade,” he said. “What Muslim man would ever contemplate such a crime?”

  I hung up and just stood there, suddenly feeling very lonely in that foreign airport.

  Why on earth would Poe assassinate Scheherazade? I wondered. How strange Westerners are!

  Cautiously, I boarded the plane, avoiding men’s stares. But these men are Germans, I then reminded myself, not Americans. Yet who knows, I thought, maybe Edgar Allan Poe was of German descent — and they are all Anglo-Saxons, aren’t they? Killing Scheherazade — what a horrible idea.

  Will I feel safer in Latin Europe? I wondered.

  1. Hiam Aboul-Hussein and Charles Pellat, Ch
eherazade, Personnage littéraire (Algiers: Société Nationale d’édition et de Diffusion, 1976), p. 20.

  2. Introduction to Le Livre Des Mille Et Une Nuit (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1980), p. vi. Translated by Dr. J. C. Mardrus.

  3. Husain Haddawy’s introduction to his translation of The Arabian Nights (New York: Norton and Co., 1990), p. xiv.

  4. “Le 2 Février 1709. Je prêtai mon IXo volume des Mille et Une Nuits à Melle de Versamont afin qu’elle en fit la lecture avec Mme la duchesse de Brissac . . .” Jean Gaulmer’s introduction to Les Mille Et Une Nuit, translated by Antoine Galland (Paris: Edition Garnier-Flammarion, 1965), vol. III, p. 12.

  5. Lynn Thornton, La Femme dans la Peinture Orientaliste, ACR Editions, Paris, 1985. Translated from the English by JerØme Coignard, p. 6, p. 256.

  6. Antoine Galland confessed in his journal that he much preferred the philosophy of Gassendi to Descartes. “Il avait, nous dit son journal, ‘plus de goùt pour la philosophie de Mr Gassendi que pour celle de Mr Descartes,’” in Galland, Les Mille Et Une Nuit , op. cit., vol. III, p. 5.

  7. Husain Haddawy’s translation of The Arabian Nights, op. cit., p. 66.

  8. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 70.

  9. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.

  10. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.

  11. Haddawy, op. cit., p. 71.